Whether it is in summer’s glorious plunge into cold weather, in the ocean’s crashing waves, in the cause of a scraped knee, or simply in rain, the world is constantly falling around us. Now as the seasons wane towards the stillness of winter, falling nature screams in color. These following poems scream in much the same way; they brim with activity, noise, and an abundance of quaking emotion.
Peace and love,
Mayan Godmaire
Creative Writing Editor
In Praise of a Shipwreck
Kim Chartrand
Contributor
When one’s life is always waves crashing
Sharks in the water circling a mangled body
Fallen overboard by the bay, splain across driftwood
Close to safety but never quite there.
One lives for the calm.
For the moment in between Moments.
I live for the days where nothing is expected of me
Where I don’t do anything and I don’t have to do anything.
I don’t have to be stressed about sharks
Or the undercurrent
or waves that keep me pinned to the tattered planks
I can examine a compass without needing to follow
I can count the clouds hanging above, speckling the sky
Mind-numbing bliss.
Not happiness, per se, but bliss, calm.
And I know as the clock tower in town strikes 12 and the day resets,
That I will have to worry again.
That another riptide is going to heave me back under,
Batter me against the rocks beneath the waves
Until I give in to the pull
Of the seaweed and the eels
Their tendrils holding me stagnant, weightless
Let the water fill my lungs, let my lungs hold still
Let the steady inhale-exhale of ocean stop
But until then, until the sharks leer at me, hungry,
Until my flesh and bones thrash ungracefully towards the shore
I let the ocean carry me, on my patch of rotting debris
I exist
Not for anything extremely good,
But simply for the sake of existing
If only for one day,
Or one hour,
or one second,
I breathe.
I breathe in the salty air as my head barely bobs above the current.
I see the sunset on the horizon, the way the sand of the beach glistens
Almost like a billion tiny stars
The ocean doesn’t seem so overwhelming
And the jellyfish caress my wounds instead of stinging them
And this is enough to keep me going towards that shoreline
For however long I can.
Try Not to Let Go (After Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf)
By Carson Laframboise
Contributor
A broken body and soul
Tormented by onlookers
Who she could not see
Beyond the waves surrounding her.
The sand bites through her soles,
The rain punctures her shoulders,
She has only just begun to live for years,
But cannot stop, yet.
She longed to change positions with
Anyone. The opportunity was never there
But it always mocked her for hoping.
Why persevere? Why not?
A challenge is a challenge,
There will always be a prize,
Should there be no trophy, just take the
Condescending remarks and tell the naysayers to “shove it”.
But how can this feeling be replicated when the
Challengers avoid you?
Their fear of losing is complemented by
Their ability to not risk anything
Leaves her with no choice but to not surrender
Until the day she can win.
The waves are higher, now.
The faces are gone, not
Her enemies, but her friends.
She has to continue to see them again
Or her foes will confront her if she lets herself go.
She must try, but it is becoming difficult.
“Never surrender” is whispered in the dirt,
Though that makes things more difficult.
She must go on, but the waves are swallowing her
And she isn’t conscious of what to do.
By Dylan Ford
Contributor
The door sticks
in the dog-dead days of summer
as does the skin
of the kids who dance in
acid-drenched wife beaters.
Bonded by
the sour sweat beads
laced around their necks
they feel
each other
feeling
everything
and yet,
nothing
at all.
Brimming with bad habits
of which they deny
in this madness
their richness
richer
than summer peaches.
“Humanity’s hourglass”
By Flora Baruel Vianna
Contributor
The world has been ending for thousands of years. After countless lifetimes of chaos and havoc, Terra must have gotten used to it, and we are to blame. Round and round again we go, stuck somewhere between a friend and a foe, like children, we have no conscience of what we're doing. Who are we really harming?
Animals kill for one reason and one alone; survival. I guess if we trace back our steps it might have started out that way but what the hell happened along the road? How did we get all the way over here? Massacres! shootings! bombings! We have done unspeakable things to our own kind: The Holocaust, Slavery, Residential schools, Human trafficking, Military dictatorships, Terrorism, Roman-Catholic child abuse, Salem "witch" trials must I go on? And all for what, nobody is hurting us other than our own shallow and miserable selves.
The Planet is the one getting caught in this crossfire of extinction, Earth was doing just fine without us and it will do much better after we leave. I guess we were supposed to be higher beings, evolved minds. Maybe we are, maybe we were the mistake before correction, prototype #1, the "experiment gone wrong".
One thing is certain, the apocalypse will not be a biblical event: slowly but surely, we will be the horsemen bringing Plague, Famine, War and Death.
Mother Earth is simply getting back at us. Hundreds of thousands of years of being secondary passengers on Her land, we have been nothing short of ungrateful and selfish towards Her, especially with the turn of industrial millenia. We have been killing our home since we first knew how.
Some of us spend our entire lives devoted to doing anything we can to repair the damages done by our predecessors, while others couldn't care less, while others don't believe there is a problem, while others lose hope and just try to live one life at a time,
It takes a second to break something but it might take a lifetime to fix it.
If you stop to think what can you do about all the destruction, the answer is: anything. Anything to right a wrong. Anything to right a wrong. The world needs healers there have been enough killers why not do what we can to help patch another’s wounds? Our humanity is slipping away, reach out and grasp it with all the care.
Nurture it to life as if it could save the world…